"All the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and . . . the State should be abolished." —Benjamin Tucker

"You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." —James Madison

"Fat chance." —Sheldon Richman

Available Now! (click cover)

America's Counter-Revolution

The Constitution Revisited

From the back cover:

This book challenges the assumption that the Constitution was a landmark in the struggle for liberty. Instead, Sheldon Richman argues, it was the product of a counter-revolution, a setback for the radicalism represented by America’s break with the British empire. Drawing on careful, credible historical scholarship and contemporary political analysis, Richman suggests that this counter-revolution was the work of conservatives who sought a nation of “power, consequence, and grandeur.” America’s Counter-Revolution makes a persuasive case that the Constitution was a victory not for liberty but for the agendas and interests of a militaristic, aristocratic, privilege-seeking ruling class.

Friday, June 06, 2014

We live in angry times. For evidence, turn on any news program. An awful lot of people, led by right-wing politicians and radio and TV entertainers, are angry at Barack Obama for trading five Taliban officials, who have been held for years without charge in the Guantánamo prison, for an American soldier, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who apparently walked away from his outpost after having a change of heart about the Afghan war. The Right is apoplectic.

To make matters worse for the right wing, Obama had the nerve to embrace — on the grounds of the White House no less — the soldier’s parents, who themselves are under suspicion by the Right. Bergdahl’s father, after all, wears an ominously bushy beard (is the Calvinist really a Muslim?) and spoke to his son in Pashto, the language of the son’s captors. Worse yet, he was so desperate to rescue his son that he tweeted to a Taliban spokesman, “I am still working to free all Guantánamo prisoners. God will repay for the death of every Afghan child, ameen.” (The tweet was later deleted.)

The Center for a Stateless Society

Recognize

I am a Palestinian.

HT: Roderick Long

Anticopyright

Unless otherwise noted, to the extent possible under law, Sheldon Richman has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to all original content on the Free Association blog, through the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. This work is published from: United States.

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“Logic and ethics are fundamentally the same, they are no more than duty to oneself.”